The present invention relates to a fax message recorder and relay system and method. More specifically, the present invention relates to a system and method for forwarding fax communications.
The use of facsimile systems is now quite common. In particular, many businesses use such facsimile systems, often called fax machines, for sending and receiving text and/or graphics over a telephone line. The use of such machines allows instantaneous transfer of documents over the telephone system.
Although the documents can be transferred instantaneously, many fax machine owners do not have constant access to their machines such that communication to these people is hindered. This is especially true for those who are on the road all the time, such as salesmen. In that case, the fax machine can only work like a mail box and hold the messages until the person returns.
Among various patents which relate to the fax communications is U.S. Pat. No. 4,785,355 to Matsumoto. This patent discloses an apparatus allowing the forwarding of fax messages. A station calling the apparatus disclosed by this patent may indicate that the fax message should also be transferred to another transferred destination. Alternately, the apparatus may be preprogrammed to forward urgent calls to another telephone number at which the owner of the receiving fax may temporarily be located.
The Kurokawa U.S. Pat. No. 4,607,289 shows a fax machine which receives a fax message and stores the machine in memory. Additionally, the fax message or data is relayed to another remote fax machine designated by the originating station.
The Sueyoshi U.S. Pat. No. 4,654,718 shows a fax machine which notifies the person to whom the fax is directed by dialing his telephone number.
The Hashimoto U.S. Pat. No. 4,788,714 shows an arrangement to couple telephone answering machine operation along with other equipment such as a fax machine to the same telephone line. The arrangement is used to switch through telephone calls to the correct device and to prevent the inconvenience caused by immediate operation of all the devices connected to the same telephone line.
The Nohtomi U.S. Pat. No. 4,796,091 shows a selector type of device wherein an incoming fax message can be displayed, stored, or printed depending upon the receiver's selection.
Although the above and other devices have been somewhat useful, there remains much room for improvement. In particular, arrangements wherein the person sending the fax message can designate relay or transfer stations is of little use to a salesman who is on the road. Such an arrangement may be helpful if one wishes to send a fax to different locations of a particular company. However, someone sending a fax to a salesman or someone else on the road would not know necessarily that the person is gone and would be most unlikely to know exactly where the message should be forwarded. Those arrangements which allow a fax machine owner or operator to preprogram a forwarding destination are useful when the person knows exactly where they will be. For example, if they are going on a trip to a single destination and they have the fax number at that destination, they could preprogram that into the device. The device or system would then forward the fax message to the number which was preprogrammed. However, if the person did not know the fax number of his destination or had a large number of destinations and his schedule was subject to variation, such an arrangement wherein a preprogrammed forwarding number is left at the fax machine is not especially helpful.
From the above, it will be seen that various fax systems for relaying messages have been somewhat lacking in flexibility. A further disadvantage of numerous of those systems is that they may use an auxiliary relay device or system as the terminating device on the incoming fax message. In other words, the incoming fax message is preceded by a telephone ring signal, which ring signal is terminated when a machine "picks up" the telephone call. Generally, such relay systems provide for the relay system to pick up the telephone call in which case the local fax machine is no longer on line. This often requires complex arrangements and may hinder the production of a local hard copy of the fax message. In other words, the relay device may store the message and forward it to a prescribed location, but the local fax machine may not print out the same message absent complex arrangements.
Another problem with various fax relay systems is that they are not transparent, meaning that the sending fax exchanges protocol signals with the relay system and realizes that the relay system is not necessarily the same as the receiving fax. In other words, when the relay system is receiving a message which should be forwarded, the relay system is actively engaging in the communication process as opposed to passively watching (transparently operating) while the local fax machine receives messages from the remote or sending fax machine. The active operation of such relay systems requires further design complications if one is also going to have the relay device produce a local hard copy at the local fax machine.